> Bus stop balancing saves riders’ time. Riders save between 12 and 24 seconds per stop removed.

I wonder if this savings includes the additional time to walk further to a stop.

Especially in light of this quote:

> In England, where 28 percent of all bus passengers are on concessionary fares for age or disability

Most bus users I know don't mind how far away the stop is, within a certain time. They really care about waiting long times at the stop because the bus is infrequent or unreliable.

Humans walk at roughly 2.1-3.0mph. "European cities" are listed as having bus stops 984-1476 ft apart, which would imply you'd typically walk half that to reach the nearest one (492-738 ft), which for a fit 3.0mph person is 2-3 minutes, and for a frail old 2.1mph person is 3-4 minutes.

Of course, people can be further away than that (they live orthagonally to the bus route), but you get the point. If you doubled bus stop distances to 1476ft apart, it would not add many walking minutes for the users.

Bus users can compensate for extra walking time by leaving earlier, provided the bus is on time. Good bus services can estimate arrivals in realtime, and show it to users on websites, apps, etc. as well as at the bus stop.

Bus punctuality is affected by a number of factors (e.g. traffic congestion, temporary and dedicated bus lanes), including number of stops.

The faster a bus can complete its route, the higher the route frequency can be with the same number of buses+drivers, which means buses pick up passengers more often, which means fewer passengers per stop (because less time between pickups), which means faster boarding, which in turn allows for a higher reliable route frequency. Having payment schemes like tap on/tap off, and having multiple entry doors also improves boarding times.

Easily. Going from 700 -> 1000 ft spacing adds 150 feet of walking (x2 for both sides of the trip). That's about 1 minute. Over a mile you'd reduce the number of stops by 2.2. So above 2 miles it's faster even for the lower end of that range of savings.

And that doesn't even consider that a faster bus route means you need fewer buses to run the same number of trips, so you can either run more trips (and save even more time for riders waiting for their bus) or cut down costs for the transit operator.

It depends on how long you are on the bus. It cost a few minutes, but a couple miles on the but makes up for the lost time. So for short trips where healty people should walk or bike it slows things down but for longer trips it is faster.

By doubling the walk, increasing the trip time for riders by 5 minutes and potentially making bus untenable in bad weather.

I doubt they’d be able to measure that with any accuracy.